Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Ten years ago I went to Miami Winter Dance with the rest of the Spin crew. Spurning the daytime panels(just like absolutely everybody else attending the festival did), one day we drove out to the Haitian quarter of town. It actually was a little bit like slipping out of the First World for a while; the roads there were noticeably worse, not exactly dirt track, but there was a slight sense of Nature encroaching. There wasn't actually much to see or do, but there was a record store. I can't remember exactly what was on display, but the vinyl was intriguing enough for me to approach the counter with a view to buying an LP. The guy looked at me like I was nuts. The records weren't for sale. Gradually it became apparent that this wasn't a record store in the conventional sense at all, that it made its money in a totally different way. You brought in a blank cassette and then for a payment the guy would tape whatever record you chose from those on display on the walls and you'd go off and play it in your car or boombox or whatever. (Essentially I would have been depriving the store owner of a piece of revenue-generating hardware, if I'd managed to buy the record off him). The store did however have a few pre-recorded cassettes on sale, and the above is what I picked up. Sadly it wasn't much cop, a lo-fi hand-held-mike field recording type affair of percussion and chants, not nearly as bloodcurdling as "Bludclot Artattack" or other voodoo-magic-referencing darkcore.

^^^^^^^^^^^^

Cassettes: anybody jonesing for a megadose of Woebot since his departure from the scene would do well to pick up this month's issue of FACT (#25, the April/May issue, free), where Matt has a large feature on his latest obsession: the obsolete audio playback technology of tape decks and portable cassette-players. With typical never-do-anything-by-half obsessiveness he has become a total expert on vintage top-of-the-range decks and deluxe versions of the Walkman (or rivals to it), and a skilled hunter-hoarder of high-quality cassettes that are no longer manufactured but can be found in caches across the webscape (certain highly-rated chrome and metal brands going for as high as 30 pounds for a single C90, wouldyabelieveit!). He's a firm believer in the sonic superiority--warmer, fuller, stronger--of this analog medium to MP3 players.

What I'm wondering is, it's all very well cannily investing yer subcultural capital in outmoded analog media, but is there any cool to be had from, erm, never having given up using your Walkman in the first place? I was never that big a fan of the walking-through-the-city-encased-in-your-own-soundtrack experience. But on long trips I do still bring the Walkman along sometimes (the same one I do interviews on, so the sound really does wipe the floor with the iPod), dragging out the bulky contraption and clattering the cassette cases on the fold-down airplane or Amtrak table, half-expecting younger fellow passengers to give me bemused looks. (Well Kieran had a student babysitter who had never seen a record player before, she was like, "what's that?" pointing at my turntable). I rather like the privation of only having four or six or whatever options in terms of listening, as opposed to the iPod's array of options (like one of those old fashioned diners with over-large menus, page after page of flapping plastic, i can never decide what to order). And I prefer being obliged to stick with the album (or mix) as a unitary experience (if only because it's too much of pain in the arse to fast-forward). I must say also that (as much I'm grateful to friends or near-strangers who've sent me CD-Rs in recent years) for some reason I'm much more bonded to the mixtapes and whole-album cassettes from earlier; it's not so much that more effort went into their making, they just seem more attractive and solid for some reason. But perhaps this is just the romance of the outmoded, the bygone. Still, I might dig out and scan up some favourite customised tapes of yore, like this one I posted recently that was decorated by my art student friend Amanda.

"a deliberate attempt to subvert the usual course of conformity and signal perfection within digital imaging. Information packets (internet imagery), which are communicated with integrity are intentionally lost in transit or otherwise misplaced and rearranged.... The works and consequently, the world, become remixed by chance operations and ghost processes, leaving you with something beautiful but shifted away from the concrete and certain...."

Connecting a few recents dots… if I'm not mistaken, those Company and Incus records, I actually borrowed and taped them from West Norwood Library...

Thinking about it some more, the Deleuze & Guattari quote about "a scribble effacing all lines" is probably much more applicable to (and doubtless was originally more inspired by) free jazz/fire music than non-idiomatic improv, which is quite capable of being spare, spacious, still, ruminative and reductionist (see the "New London Silence" and "lowercase" currents in improv, with which Wastell's been connected) as it is of being a 200 m.p.h. blast of honkathonic screech. "Scribble effacing" also applies to an awful lot of noise music, especially the power electronics/Merzbow end of things… The slippage from the kind of aesthetic fascism D&G warn about to the other kinds of fascism (including the party-of-one fascism of the serial murderer) makes perfect sense; it's the lyrical analogue to the sonic lust for a kind of annihilating absolutism, so-called "pure states" of being. (Incidentally Jeremy Gilbert, co-author of the excellent technorave studyDiscographies, just sent me a very interesting-looking essay he wrote on non-idiomatic improv that uses Deleuze & Guattari's ideas of the rhizomatic as a prism for analysing/celebrating that mode of music-making... picking up in fact from the links made in the Sex Revolts between D&G + Miles/Can/etc.... Gilbert's essay came out in a book called Deleuze and Music).

Now, non-idiomatic improv: that's music that has severed its ties with jazz, at least in the Derek Bailey version of its history, right? Jazz, though: been listening to that quite a bit of late. Partly because of a sudden impulse to "do" the 20th Century properly, having realised recently that large swathes of it I've only got a rather tenuous grip on (e.g. classical music that isn't concrete or electronic; jazz beyond those obvious rockcritic faves (Miles, Sun Ra, few others); blues; erm… the entire non-West!). Partly, also, because the idea of steeping my ears in the era of Giant Steps Forward seems distinctly attractive at a time when music is shuffling about in sheepish circles, marching on the spot, or retracing its steps. And finally also because I was recently favored with a CD from Woebot based around his last post before retirement, that lunatic-in-its-vastness survey of Jazz; a CD with 42 mp3s on it,ranging from Ellington to jazz-funk (I don't think there's much on it from the Eighties onwards, which rather suited me).

Absolutely fabulous stuff all, but I must admit that having listened to the whole three hours-approx a bunch of times, the stuff I seem to dig the most is the fusion. Or not so much fusion (precisely used that refers to Grover Washington Jr and Yellowjackets, right?) but jazz-rock specifically. Or "electric Jazz" to use Kevin Martin's much cooler-sounding and accurate-yet-open-ended formulation, the conceptual spur for that great compilation he did in 1996, Jazz Satellites. On the Woebot CD my favourite cuts are Mahavishnu Orchestra's "You Know You Know" , Don Cherry's "Brown Rice" (also on Jazz Satellites), Billy Cobham's "Stratus", Weather Report's "Non Stop Home," Roy Ayers's "We Live In Brooklyn"… and naturally the Miles Davis selections from In A Silent Way and Get Up With It, which I know like the back of my hand. I wonder why? Well, there's fusion's sheer groove factor: the breakbeat-y opening to "Non Stop Home" is worthy of The Meters, and in fact when the track gets more "jazzy" and less propulsive it loses some of its simpleton appeal. Mainly I think it's because the colour spectrum in jazz-rock is more varied and vivid, sometimes to the point of vulgarity, and for someone who's grown up with pop music and its studio-doctored textural palette that is going to give the music an advantage. It's a bit like the difference between a black-and-white movie and Technicolor. 70s jazz-rock/fusion equally doesn't really trigger the received images of suits etc that gets in the way a bit with earlier jazz, whether cool or hot, bebop or free; your mind's eye's mise en scene is less likely to be a stage in a crowded, smoky bar, and more likely to be cosmic, oceanic, rainforesty imagery, or urban panoramic. That encumbering baggage of jazz stylisation is not the original music's fault exactly but the crust of cliches definitely obstructs when it comes to recapturing the sensation of radicalism the music transmitted in its own day, the plunge into the unknown. (In the same way that it can be hard to recapture the wildness and sensual insurrection of 50s rock'n'roll).

On this topic, I've been reading bits and bobs of Stanley Crouch's collection Considering Genius: Writings On Jazz. He's a stylish writer so it's enjoyable even though I know I'm extremely unlikely to ever bother checking out any of these Nineties-onwards "keepers of the flame" type players he supports so gushingly (if only because I need to attend to so many of the original flame-igniters first). Enjoyable also because it's bracing to read someone pungently and often waspishly espouse a completely opposite ideology of jazz to the one I'd adhere to (both out of taste and out of instinct), i.e. this neo-conservative [i should have written: neo-classicist]vision Crouch has controversially pushed in tandem with his ally Wynton Marsalis via the Lincoln Center and that Ken Burns Jazz series (which I never watched). Basically their stance (crudely summarized) is that the essence of jazz is "swing" and blues feeling; it must be played on acoustic (and non-effected) instruments in real time; for this reason, the fusion era was an "aesthetic death valley" (and--this seems to really offend Crouch--a fashion crime spree; he's a big fan of suits and ties and is quite hilariously rude about the garish outfits Miles wore in the 70s and 80s, that whole "sci-fi snazz" look).

Miles in 1989

In a long Epilogue to Considering Genius, Crouch dreamily drifts through memories of favourite performers and performances from the last couple of decades, dishing out praise to newcomers whose playing is steeped in history and glazed with reverence, but also to "prodigal sons" who have returned to the Path of Righteousness. (Like Freddie Hubbard, who put away his platform shoes and plaid pants and became the sharpest dressed cat on the neo-classicist scene; the story goes that he renounced fusion after a Damascene revelation--being nearly electrocuted to death when "the wire to an electronic gadget he had attached to his trumpet was pulled through some water"!!!).

Freddie Hubbard, Keep Your Soul Together, 1973

In this long languid reverie, the musicians Crouch praises are always extending or refining "the language" of an early great; the ghosts of departed legends and dead mentors are always flitting through particular stretches of playing. All these winding lines of filiation traced between hallowed forefathers and their self-chosen sons reminds me of Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence--except without the anxiety. It’s a literally epigonic vision of how music works, how it grows; incrementally, through renovation and careful craft, a glossy veneer of veneration applied in what seems to me the musical equivalent to furniture restoration. (Actually, this pro-tradition/anti-bohemianism/anti-iconoclasm standpoint is not unlike Joe Carducci's ideas about rock).

There doesn't seem to be much scope for the shock of the new, for Giant Steps Forward and especially not Sideways. Miles Davis gets no end of obloquy for leading a generation astray with the mirage of going pop and reaching a young black street audience; for mutilating his talent and squandering his gift. White critics of a certain persuasion also get major flak for championing these and other radical-chic courting and/or street-crediblility-seeking downwardly-mobile moves within jazz, their support diagnosed by Crouch as part of their futile attempts to rebel against their own middle class backgrounds. For him, the embourgeoisment of jazz was its proper destiny; gentility and elegance are its essence (he quotes Albert Murray on how the first thing Man does once he gets beyond subsistence-level existence, is aspire to Style); a sense of heritage is its lifeblood and guardian. From the brothels of New Orleans to the Lincoln Center in uptown Manhattan…

The swipe at "electronic instruments"--he's talking about the shimmering electric pianos of Zawinul and Corea and Hancock--one of the all-time great sounds in music!--plus McLaughlin's fantastic guitar. "Wallpaper ": he's slurring as "décor" what is really the album's great innovation, its environmental, immersive quality, the way a mood is stretched out to become an ocean of sound (and Macero's later production of Miles on specifically "He Loved Him Madly" I think it was, got cited by Eno as a major influence on him coming up with ambient). As for "maudlin"!!! - I cannot figure that one out at all.

For Crouch, In A Silent Way is where Miles's story as a creative figure and innovating icon ends, whereas I'm sure for a lot of us that's where it gets really interesting. How weird. For me, In A Silent Way in its entirety, the title track of Bitches Brew, side one of One The Corner, "He Loved Him Madly": that's ultimate music; not much else is up there with it, hardly anything higher.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

I got a most peculiar sensation reading the Epiphany column at the back of the latest (June) issue of The Wire--an account of a life-changing gig written by improvising cellist Mark Wastell--which was I went to this show, didn't I? In fact it's a gig the whereabouts and whenabouts of which I've been trying to remember for a while now. Now I know precisely: March 12th, 1989, the Royalty Theatre, Holborn, London; Evan Parker as support act to the headlining trio of Anthony Braxton, Adelhard Roidinger, and Tony Oxley.

Reading the column, the mirroring effect was quite uncanny: Wastell's reactions to the performances correlated bizarrely with my own (but how he reacted to those reactions ultimately being totally different). An unusual venue, never been to before, never been to since? CHECK! Slightly aghast at the audience, an all-male miasma of thick sweaters, brown cardigans, bad hair, face foliage? CHECK! Bemused bothered and bored witless as Parker's fingers run rapidly up and down, up and down his soprano saxophone for approx 40 minutes, the resulting shrill, gratingly sibilant patterns repetitious in the extreme yet never falling into anything that resembles groove or melody? CHECK! Very very slightly more taken by the abstrusities of the headliners (at least there's three levels of incomprehensibility going on at once) but literally pained by Oxley's compulsion to swipe his drumstick against his cowbell every few minutes, producing a really nasty metallic scraping sound? CHECK!

20 years old in 1989, Wastell was already a jazz fan, albeit the kind more likely to go down Ronnie Scott's; his objections to the improv performers were as much sartorial (where's the suits?) as sonic. But his response to his own feelings of befuddled incomprehension was to work through them ("Think, stupid boy!"). It was literally a Turning Point in his life: he eventually became an improviser himself, is now in a band with Evan Parker, even--he notes wryly--owns a woolly cardigan of his own. Where Wastell rose to the challenge, I sank from it, shrank from it. The show was an anti-Epiphany, a Turning-Off Point. Well, not quite as dramatic as that, but certainly it helped to cap and confirm a mounting feeling of being not-attracted/not-convinced by that whole area of music (which I'd dutifully checked out, as you do--a Company recording here, an Incus release there--because some smart people with otherwise sharp taste are really into this shit). The gig at the Royalty Theatre contributed to the turn-off partly for sociological reasons (having had a good up-close sniff of the audience, would I really want to be the kind of person into this thing? Or even stand in the same room as them on a regular basis?), but mostly for musical ones: I honestly could not hear the music in it.

There were also probably embryonic inklings of a philosophical scepticism about the aesthetico-political ideas underpinning the entire project of non-idiomatic improvisation, questionable shibboleths of freedom, authenticity, purity, integrity, finding a space outside the commercial. One argument runs that music made purely in the moment, composed as it is played, never documented, unrepeatable, ephemeral as experience itself, escapes being trapped by commodification/reification/alienation; is in fact the only really "live music" that there is. But if you're actually selling tickets, surely you are in fact commodifying the Unrepeatable Moment? (Also it strikes me that improv musicians--and experimentalists generally--put out way more recordings than almost anybody else in music, they churn out releases--including live recordings--to milk their micro-niche market, presumably mainly to have any hope of making a livelihood, but still a recording sold for money is a commodity, there's no getting around that.)

A few years later I came across a passage in Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaux, where they warned of a kind of aesthetic fascism that avant-garde and "free" music of all kinds can often approach in its haste to break all barriers ASAP, a fixation on "the child, the mad, noise" that results in "a scribble effacing all lines", and I thought, "YEAH, too right. Spot on, chaps". Translating that into political terms, you could see free music as an aural dramatization of some of the problems with anarchism, at least of the no-rules-at-all, Sovereign Ego kind, which is that what is supreme freedom for the individual (the musician) can translate to tyranny for everybody else (the listeners). (I think a good deal of ideological projection is required by the pre-disposed listener to identify with that spectacle of freedom-in-musicking, which seems somewhat contrived to me, and also hard work for not much gain). (I know there is a counter-argument, which would view the free improv ensemble as working out through sound the same ideals and issues that co-operatives and communes grapple with in terms of social organisation, the workplace, the politics of everyday life, cohabitation... but, well, the history of those movements, while noble, is also fraught and marked by a fairly high rate of failure and dysfunction. Besides that model doesn't explain what role the audience has, beyond paying (to) witness a spectacle of non-hierarchic collaboration in action. [Also: a version of that spectacle is surely offered by most rock bands anyway; discipline voluntarily embraced; united we groove, divided we get booed offstage; the Groop Played Neu!Topian Motorik Musik...] [Or indeed more conventional jazz outfits that swing and groove, while allotting spaces for individual expression, etc]

(Why was I even at the concert? It must have been curiosity about Braxton. Plus 1989 was a bit of a disparate, slack year, with some casting around for stuff to write about--I'd be reviewing all kinds of odd things, ECM albums, Zorn concerts at Queen Elizabeth Hall. So I must have gone with the intention of reviewing the gig, but came home with an empty notebook--almost unheard of, that, and in a sense an achievement on the part of the musicians).

I must say, though, having raised all those objections and rationales, I have been thinking of giving that whole area another "go". Giving Derek Bailey's oeuvre a proper once-over, or select highlights thereof (given how bleedin' vast it is -- suggestions and hints for good entry points welcomed) See if the apparent random-ness finally resolves itself (in the past, I confess, his guitar playing has sounded to me a bit like someone who's just unwrapped a parcel marked "damaged in transit" by the Post Office, lifted up the carriage clock inside, only for all these cogs and spindles to tumble tinklingly on the floor). And all the other big guys in the field too. My interest was actually piqued by a piece in another issue of The Wire, a few months back, the March cover story on John Butcher. I really warmed to the opening quote from Butcher:

"This music is here in opposition to other music. It doesn't all co-exist together nicely. The fact that I have chosen to do this implies that I don't value what you're doing over there. My activity calls into questions the value of your activity. This is what informs our musical thinking and decision making."

This bracingly stern stance struck me as in line with nu-rockist principles, or K-punk's talk of "nihilation" as a motor force in UK pop culture. Fighting talk, literally; wedded to the idea of "opposition", in both senses of the word. I was further intrigued by discussion in the interview (which was conducted by Philip Clark) of Butcher's use of electronics, effects and studio technology (overdubbing, multitracking) to expand his spectrum of timbres (and also, judging by Clark's account, to expand the spectrality of his sound, its ghost-swarm disembodiment). All this being especially the case on the album Invisible Ear, "a solo saxophone record that doesn't want to sound like a solo saxophone record." (If only they were all like that, eh?).

And whaddyaknow, it's a fantastic record, as are The Geometry of Sentiment and Requests and AntiSongs (the latter done with electronics manipulator Phil Durrant). Butcher's music has an attractive combination of textural voluptuousness and severity; it is demanding, but also generous.

Reminded me that the other week I had for some reason suddenly remembered a periodicial whose existence I'd completely forgot, a publication that fits the GB universe as perfectly as Penguins/Pelicans/Peregrines and polytechnics, and that's The Listener, the BBC's own highbrow weekly magazine, which ran in parallel with the more functional and middlebrow Radio Times. I didn't know The Listener was founded way back in the Lord Reith era, in 1929, nor that it managed to limp on until 1991. Heavyweight contributors judging by this. Strangely I don't think I ever in my whole life actually read a copy (whereas I betcha Robin Carmody has sat himself down in some Dorset pubic library and gone through the entire run). It was, as I recall, rather frumpy in aura and appearance.

Folklore and Mathematics, Ghost Box's own periodical, initially seemed like it might be something Listener-like, or a journal with photographic plates--something that comes numbered according to Volume, intended to be bound and shelved--but when it arrived it was actually more like a parish newsletter crossed with Radio Times.

Monday, May 19, 2008

Friday, May 16, 2008

Goodies in the post: Data 70's Space Loops Volume One and Space Loops Volume Two. Good-looking (especially the former, a gatefold-sleeved double-7 inch with 16 tracks across four sides) and great-sounding contributions to the area that begins with H. (Naturally, when asked in Gutterbreakz's interview if they feel affinity with the memoradelic crew, Data 70 's Bob Bhamra and Jon Chambers politely shrug off the association). Although everyone in that field is influenced by library music or uses it as a sound-source in terms of samples, few have actually made anything that sounds like it could be modern-day library (the recently-started Mordant Music 'Travelogues' series of download-only releases, maybe...). But that's what Data 70's short themes sound like: yes, the imprint of the familiar constellation of talismans and touchstones is there but equally this is music that could only have been made after the 90s electronic moment.

I must say I was tickled to learn that Data 70 call their studio West Norwood Cassette Library, as West Norwood/West Dulwich was where I lived for about a year when I first moved to London from Oxford. And I recall that the local library's unusually good record section was one of the few redeeming things about the area (at least in 1986; maybe it's improved). That and the excellently serene cemetery.

^^^^^^^^^^^

A word also for bleaklow, the superb new release by V/VM alter-ego The Stranger, especially the queasy wilting synths and staggering punch-drunk beats of "Indefinite Ridge".

As Wiley and his "Rolex" this week inch ever closer to the Top Spot--only Madonna and Timberlake in the way now, a pox on their eyes--another Nuum incursion into the UK pop chart slips out of the Top 10. I'm talking about Pendulum and their drum'n'bass/metal fusion "Propane Nightmares", which peaked at #9. Kind of stretching the Nuum to its conceptual limit here: the group are from Perth, West Australia, and although they were a force in D&B a few years back they decided to go rock and become a live group (a Prodigy-type move and indeed they famously remixed "Voodoo People" some while ago) So while their sound still has that jacknifing hard-stomping sub-Bad Company beat it's slowed down quite a bit from d&B's ZFI and is topped by Enter Shikari-style transcendo-metal tuneage(Shikari of course being huge d&b fans, repeatedly interrupting their live set with little bursts of almost touchingly wack Venetian Snares mimicry they've knocked up at home). The resulting composite is... pretty horrible actually. Have a listen for yourself . Or just look at the picture.

Actually America isn't all "have a nice day" phony warmth and politeness you know. In fact there is a particular kind of recalcitrance that some supermarket check-out people have developed over here, which is to be not overtly rude or surly, but non-responsive, in a sort of supercilious, aloof, all-this-is-beneath-me kind of way. So the typical exchange will go:

Customer: "Thank you."

Check-out person: "Mmm mmm."

Often said as close to inaudible as possible, and while already turning to face the next customer. And others just don't reply at all.

The idea seems to be: I'm not going to participate in this little ritual nicety, because this job is not who I am. Dignity and distance achieved through disdain. And fair enough really.

via Ambrose White (the chap who sent me some bassline house cd-rs several years ago) a link to community radio station Sheffield Live! and its in all ways resonantly named show Up From Below--the station's Saturday night niche for Niche and all flavas of 4X4/UKG. Shows archived here. Oh and here's one on Sundays called Drop the Funk, Drop the Bass